Unit 4 Macro: Food imports set to rise in ChinaSaturday, April 12, 2014
by Geoff Riley


This is a revealing perspective on the challenges facing China in producing enough food to feed the hundreds of millions of Chinese squeezed into their ever growing cities.
China's policy makers are trying to increase the size of farms to exploit economies of scale and get their farmers to focus on cash crops. But the reality is that China will have to import a huge amount of food in the years to come - this creates big opportunities for farmers in China's trading partners.
A consequence of urbanisation is that China's traditional agrarian sector is not able to feed the domestic population. With less land, increasingly scarce or polluted water and fewer rural workers, the issue of food scarcity is an important threat to China's economic transformation.